The Translator’s Invisibility

A slavish attachment to the letter, in translating, is originally the offspring of the superstition, not of the Church, but of the synagogue, where it would have been more suitable in Christian interpreters, the ministers, not of the letter, but of the spirit, to have allowed it to remain.

(Campbell 1789:456–457)

Like Tytler, however, Campbell also assumed the existence of a public sphere governed by universal reason. In an exchange of letters, Campbell took the self-congratulary view that the similarity of their ideas constituted “evidence” for “a concurrence in sentiment upon critical subjects with persons of distinguished ingenuity and erudition” (Alison 1818:27). Yet the elite and exclusionary nature of this cultural consensus becomes evident, not merely in Campbell’s Christian dogmatism, but also in his initial reaction to Tytler’s treatise: Campbell wrote to the publisher to learn the author’s name because, although he was “flattered not a little to think, that he had in these points the concurrence in judgment of a writer so ingenious,” he nonetheless voiced “his suspicion, that the author might have borrowed from his Dissertation, without acknowledging the obligation” (Alison 1818:27; Tytler 1978:xxxii). Campbell too was a translator with a sense of authorship—at once Christian and individualistic—that could be ruffled by other translations and translation discourses, provoking him to reactions that ran counter to his humanist assumptions.